“Strike and the World Strikes with You, Work and You Work Alone”
The Working-Class Urban Dutch and the Forces of their Faith
A Thesis
Submitted to Leiden University
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Master’s Degree
in North American Studies
By
Marleen Kramer
0709913
July 17, 2014
Supervisor: Dr. E. F. van de Bilt
Second reader: Prof. Dr. A. Fairclough
Table of Contents
1. Historiographical Backgrounds ... 4
2. The Dutch Presence in Progressive-Era Urban America ... 9
2.1 The Dutch on the Streets ... 9
2.2 The Dutch in the Workplaces ... 15
3. Congregating the Working-Class Dutch ... 23
3.1 Fathers and Fraternities ... 23
3.2 Uniting the Two ... 31
3.3 The Dutch at Pullman, 1894... 47
4. Conclusions ... 64
The working-class Dutch immigrant holds a unique place in Progressive-Era labor history. Most blue-collar American immigrants defined themselves according to geographical and class distinctions. Those from the Netherlands, however, boasted a history of exclusive yet unmistakably successful ethnic communities established almost solely on the basis of religious conviction. Indeed, since their first Separatist settlements in 1847, churches were central in shaping Dutch-American subculture.1 An unyielding reverence for the values and customs of their faith, however, placed many religious working-class urban Dutchmen in a distinct predicament during the tumultuous labor movement at the turn of the twentieth century.
The ideal of most migrating Netherlanders corresponded with a somewhat secluded agricultural life on the open plains and in the rural villages of the Great Lakes region, making those Dutch immigrants choosing, for whatever reason, to populate the ever-growing municipalities and metropolises of urban, north-eastern America an irrefutable minority. These few urban Dutch, however, remained so well-connected with their rural counterparts that Dutch historian David L. Zandstra referred to them as having been comfortably “in the city, but not of the city [emphasis added].”2 With the coming of drastic social and economic revolutions following the surge of trans-European immigrant workers and the nationwide depression dubbed the Panic of 1893, the urban Dutch minority would begin to undergo a maturation different to that of its rural counterpart. The Dutch clergies and congregations of the city could no longer be sustained by their links with the more rural ethnic strongholds alone, and were forced to question the commensurability of their faith and their future in America.
With the passing of the Gilded Age, the working classes, both immigrant and native-born, recognized that the fruits of industrial capitalism were hardly bestowed on those who had actually labored for them. Increasing poverty and political unrest among the working-class led to the formation of trade and labor unions, but also instigated bitter strikes and some of the most violent uprisings the streets and factories of America had seen to date. Many religious Dutch, and certainly those with Reform tradition backgrounds had always maintained a “dignity and respect for manual labor and a strong sense of independence,” which made it difficult for those earning a living in the urban sector to revolt against their daily employment or join any common labor movement,
1 Hans Krabbendam, “Waarom christelijke vakbeweging onder de Nederlandse immigranten in Amerika
niet aansloeg,” Cahier over de Geschiedenis van de Christelijk-Sociale Beweging (2009): 146.
2 David L. Zandstra, “In the City, But Not of the City: Dutch Truck Famers in the Calumet Region,” in
especially if this meant fraternizing with associations and stakeholders the Dutch perceived as unnecessarily violent, clandestine and by all means un-Christian.3 At the end of the day, however, if the bills could not be paid, some kind of concession with the movement would have to be made to keep the working-class Dutch both economically and socially stable.
Urban Dutch immigrants thus found themselves at a crux in choosing between upholding the often restrictive religious values and customs of their immigrant churches and communities or ameliorating their economic condition by opting to participate in the (radical) labor movements of the period rejected by their ethnic culture. Knowing that involvement could result in ruptures with their revered churches and possible condemnation from their well-established ethnic communities, to what extent were Dutch blue-collar immigrants willing to compromise their religious convictions in order to better their economic prosperity, and by extension, their social mobility in the increasingly cosmopolitan cities of turn-of-the-century America?
The extent to which any modification was necessary at all is a second and perhaps more interesting issue. Herbert Gutman was the first to challenge the labor historians’ tendencies to “overlook religion or dismiss it as a negative influence,” and ever since, a small but growing number of contemporary historians are indeed rethinking the not at all one-sided but intricate relationship between the religious sentiments and the working classes of Progressive-Era America.4 It is through this broader approach that this thesis will analyze the role(s) that the Dutch migrant churches played in the lives of their working-class flock to determine whether the urban Dutch religious institutions were truly exclusively denouncing participation in any labor movements, or if there are valid claims suggesting certain Dutch churches and their clergies were beneficiary in their involvement and support towards workers’ well-being. Furthermore, by tracing the activity of the Dutch during a case study of the direct labor confrontations at the Pullman factories in 1893–1894 Chicago, the influence that the Dutch as a minority had on the (immigrant) labor movement throughout the Progressive Era will be brought to light.
Substantial collections of personal correspondence from Progressive-Era urban Dutch have been preserved in historical and academic publications from both sides of the Atlantic, yet as these are often scattered over, among other things, time, location, faith and occupation, they can but
3 Robert P. Swierenga, Dutch Chicago: A History of the Hollanders in the Windy City (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 2002), 580.
4 Evelyn Savidge Sterne, “Bringing Religion into Working-Class History: Parish, Public, and Politics in
provide snapshots of the subject matter in question. Thankfully, another form of contemporary literature is readily available, namely, the period’s printed press. In 1927, Marcus L. Hansen promoted American immigration as a promising field of research, and claimed that the mass of literature connected with immigrants’ religions was one of the two most important sources of history yet to be tapped into.5 Almost a century later, historian Robert Schoone-Jongen writes that
contemporary Dutch ethnic journalism has still remained unexplored.6 With that in mind, I intend to be one of the first to probe those readily available ethnic language (religious) news bulletins to create an authentic sketch of the Progressive Era’s Dutch working-class and their experiences at the crossroads of their faith and the nation’s labor movement. The three newspapers forming the basis of analysis for this research are: Holland, Michigan’s De Grondwet (The Constitution) (1871–1938); Orange City, Iowa’s De Volksvriend (The People’s Friend) (1874–1935); and De Pere, Wisconsin’s De Volksstem (The People’s Voice) (1890–1919).
5 Marcus L. Hansen, “The History of American Immigration as a Field for Research,” The American
Historical Review 32.3 (1927): 518.
6 Robert Schoone-Jongen, “Fighting at the Borders: Dutch-Americans and the Paterson Silk Strike of
1913,” in Across Borders: Dutch Migration to North America and Australia, ed. Jacob E. Nyenhuis et al. (Holland, MI: Van Raalte Press, 2010): 205.
1. Historiographical Backgrounds
Immigration to America in many ways actually constitutes the nation’s very coming into existence. Excluding the American continents’ native inhabitants, the first Puritan settlers of colonial America were themselves immigrants from the Old World. In the centuries that followed, and up until today, the United States has beckoned peoples of all ethnicities to both its shores and the expanses inbetween. It is logical then, that migration is a field of study whose discourse is anything but fixed—the bulk of hard data available for research is ever expanding and more importantly, the scholarly frameworks for analysis are shifting likewise. David A. Gerber, Professor of History at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), traces the origins of American immigration historiography back to the turn of the last century, when the rising number of academic social historians presented their “intellectual reaction” to the nation’s demoralizing immigration politics and the subsequent prejudices projected onto the foreign-born.1 Among these scholars were second-generation Polish immigrants William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki who co-authored the five volumes of The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918–1920). The two shaped immigration historiography (and sociology in general) with the introduction of their “organizational paradigm”, in which migration throughout the modern Western world was analyzed as a general process of (dis)organization towards upward social mobility. At the same time, many of Thomas and Znaniecki’s successors focused more on “the lived experiences, attitudes and values” of the European migrants themselves.2 Oscar Handlin’s The Uprooted (1953)
was the Pulitzer Prize winning child of both macro and micro approaches, and as one of the first general immigrant histories to combine the perspective of the individual migrant with more encompassing sociological patterns from the entire migrant community, it was and remains a classic in American immigration historiography.
According to Handlin, the European immigrants who relocated en masse to America were almost always desperately poor, lonely and with but “a single choice remain[ing] to be made—to emigrate or to die.”3 Handlin’s early synonymy of new world immigrants and agrarian peasants
makes his history one that was, even for 1953, one-sided and archaic. Rudolph Vecoli’s 1964
1 David A. Gerber, “Immigration Historiography at the Crossroads,” Reviews in American History 39.1
(2011): 76.
2 Gerber, “Immigration Historiography,” 76.
critique of The Uprooted opened the floodgates for critical analysis of the generic history Handlin sketched of the European immigrant.4 Vecoli set the stage for increasing numbers of less conventional history scholars to incorporate issues such as gender, labor, and race theory in analyzing immigrant behavior. Clearly a reaction to Handlin’s bleak sketches, the thesis of John Bodnar’s The Transplanted (1985) argued that through multiple aspects of immigrant life, like religion and labor, sport, fraternal societies, folk-life and education, immigrants were able to comfortably settle their foreign roots in new soil.5
Although Bodnar is no labor or economic historian, it could be argued that The
Transplanted was published in the trail of the 1960s “new” labor history. At that time, labor
historians Herbert Gutman and David Montgomery had been stimulating labor historians to study the working classes themselves, and not base their research on records of labor organizations and their leaders.6 As Bodnar saw it, “in short, ethnic clusters became economic interest groups”and in determining which paths their lives were to take, immigrants were “free to choose, but barely.”7
Although Bodnar’s history is written with a focus on the everyday lives of the working class, he still did not write their history in that he concludes that migrants in America were merely differing puppets dancing to the same drum beating the rhythms of the all-encompassing capitalism.
Enter the “crossroads” Gerber feels the field of immigration historiography is stuck at. On the one hand, the field has become too “occupied with experiential reconstructions and with the formation of ethnic communities and ethnic identities to the extent that it has been reluctant to address those larger forces in the coming together of America itself.” On the other, he fears that to combine these micro and macro strands of migration history “requires speculations about consciousness that in the absence of evidence, we are not in a sound position to make.”8 David R. Roediger’s approach to labor in the form of whiteness studies makes a solid attempt at bridging Gerber’s unbridgeable, but admits that, in the process, a certain “messiness”is indispensable.9
4 Rudolph J. Vecoli, “Contadini in Chicago: A Critique of The Uprooted,” The Journal of American
History 51.3 (1964): 404–417.
5 John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1985).
6 Herbert Hill, “The Problem of Race in American Labor History,” Reviews in American History 24.2
(1996): 189–190.
7 Bodnar, The Transplanted, 137, 209.
8 Gerber, “Immigration Historiography,” 82–84.
9 David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York:
Roediger’s Working Toward Whiteness (2005) analyzes the economic and political environments of twentieth-century American immigrants as these were complemented by the changing social contours of what we now recognize as ethnicity. His narrative of the “inbetweenness” of America’s migrants is truly “agenda-setting,” moving beyond the fault lines of traditional immigration historiography and at the same time distancing himself from the success-based labor history tradition to reveal the derogatory repercussions that skin color and culture had on the working classes of the American system.10
If the trend in labor studies has been to overlook the issue of race because of its tendency to complicate writing the narratives of working-class history, no doubt the same has been the case with religion. In Vecoli’s 2001 revised bibliography on American immigration and ethnicity, referenced works concerning religion amount to a meager one of the thirty-five pages the document totals.11 (For comparison, the rubric of government immigration policy counts over three pages, that concerning gender more than three and a half.) Of those religiously-affiliated references, most are country and conviction specific – the list includes no general history of the irrefutable effects that foreign faiths had on the American nation and its people.
In 1927, Marcus L. Hansen put forward American immigration as a promising field of research, and claimed that the mass of literature connected with immigrants’ religions was one of the two most important sources of history that had yet to be tapped into; “How much lies buried in church archives can only be imagined. The great amount that found its way into print has hardly been touched.”12 Professor of church history Jay P. Dolan reveals that Hansen’s incitement only
became substance with the explosion of social history in the 1960s. Shortly thereafter, numerous denominational and parochial historical studies emerged, but because their outpouring was so extensive and was “ramifying in a hundred directions at once”, the discipline of American religious history entered into a “state of flux”.13
10 Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness, 32; Desmond King, review of Working Toward Whiteness: How
America’s Immigrants Became White, by David R. Roediger. American Historical Review 3.5 (2006): 1528.
11 Rudolph Vecoli, “A Selected Bibliography on American Immigration and Ethnicity,” 2001, accessed
May 12, 2013, http://www.ihrc.umn.edu/publications/pdf/BAIE.pdf.
12 Marcus L. Hansen, “The History of American Immigration as a Field for Research,” The American
Historical Review 32.3 (1927): 518.
13 Jay P. Dolan, “The Immigrants and Their Gods: A New Perspective in American Religious History,”
One principle of organization under which Dolan feels a certain coherence can be brought to the field of American religious history is immigration, as it is a phenomenon that cuts across denominational boundaries, and one that stimulates comparative study thanks to the vast amount of documented primary and secondary material. However, in their introduction to Immigration and
Religion in America, scholars Richard Alba, Albert J. Raboteau and Josh deWind outline that when
it comes to religion, scholars either “tend to deploy sociological categories and to emphasize the socioeconomic and political effects of religious activity” or focus on “beliefs, values, worship practices and devotional piety.” Alba et al. argue that there have been few historians who have contemplated American history under the combined precedents of religion as an institution and religion as a set of beliefs.14 Dolan puts it poetically when he labels such a historiographical tangent “moving from the pulpit to the pew,” the same idea behind the trend that emerged in labor studies shifting the focal point from the management to the assembly lines.15
In a case study of 1890–1930 Providence, Rhode Island, Evelyn Savidge Sterne combines both approaches and presents the thesis that “the Catholic church was the most important public space in working-class Providence”.16 But where historians like Roediger propose innovative, new directions in American historiography, Sterne specifically rejects past trends, particularly those upheld by labor historians. According to Dutch historian Hans Krabbendam, in labor studies, religion has been ascertained to have either fragmented industrial workers on the basis of their faiths and/or propagated an obedience towards authority such that, if anything, it could only have repressed the labor movement.17 Savidge Sterne herself can indeed cite but a “handful” of historians who did not “dismiss it [religion] as a deradicalizing influence or ignored it altogether.”18 Of these historians, most have focused on specific faiths or immigrant parishes, such as Robert Orsi on Italian Harlem and John J. Bukowczyk and Leslie Woodcock Tentler on the Catholic Polish immigrant, but the group also includes the more encompassing works of scholars
14 Richard Alba, Albert J. Raboteau and Josh deWind, eds., introduction to Immigration and Religion in
America: Comparative and Historical Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 4.
15 Dolan, “The Immigrants and Their Gods,” 64.
16 Evelyn Savidge Sterne, “Bringing Religion into Working-Class History: Parish, Public, and Politics in
Providence, 1890–1930,” Social Science History 24.1 (2000): 151.
17 Hans Krabbendam, “Waarom christelijke vakbeweging onder de Nederlandse immigranten in Amerika
niet aansloeg,” Cahier over de Geschiedenis van de Christelijk-Sociale Beweging (2009): 149.
like Ken Fones-Wolf, who has taken a closer look at the often marginalized 1910–1920s Labor Forward Movement of the American Federation of Labor in Trade Union Gospel (1989).
Since their earliest mass migrations, the Dutch have been documenting their overwhelmingly religious histories, making them an ideal group to study through the approach advocated by Savidge Sterne. The very first general chronicles of the Dutch in America were most often religiously oriented, either written by ministers or the earliest students and teachers of the Dutch-American colleges that were springing up in the Midwest. With the popularity of conducting quantitative historical research on the rise in the 1980s, Robert P. Swierenga entered the Dutch-American historical scene and set the stage for more statistical-based history writing. In spite of the move towards specialization and the establishment of transatlantic scholarly Dutch-American research institutes, conferences and even the Origins semiannual publication by the Calvin College in Grand Rapids, from the last decades of the twentieth century and onward, the religious factor remains the most prominent in Dutch-American historiography. And because the Dutch identity was best preserved among immigrants with strong religious affiliation, the rural communities of those Dutch-Americans, and especially the Secessionists, have received the most scholarly attention. With the exception of Hylke Speerstra’s Cruel Paradise: Life Stories of Dutch
Emigrants (2005), most studies of the Dutch in America were inspired by a certain nostalgia and
presented an overtly positive and almost reverential undertone.
This study aims to be different. By taking a closer look at the marginalized urban Dutch through the combined wide-angle lenses of religion and labor, this research will contribute to the renunciation of the one-sided historiography of both the Dutch in America and the role of religion in labor studies.
2. The Dutch Presence in Progressive-Era Urban America
2.1 The Dutch on the Streets
The Dutch immigrants were never a dominant presence in urban, Progressive-Era America. In the entire century of 1820 – 1920, Dutch immigration to America totaled under 400 000 migrants – less than the number of Irish settling in the United States in each decade of that same century.1 Indeed, as revealed by the 1911 reports of the United States Immigrant Commission, better known as the Dillingham Commission, from 1899 to 1909, the Dutch (grouped together with the Flemish) totaled only 74 646 of just over 9.5 million immigrants in the United States; almost half of these Dutch migrants went to the states of Michigan and Illinois.2 Furthermore, it is a widely accepted and well-documented fact that most of the Dutch settling in America preferred the rural, agricultural setting above that of the urban, industrial one. Those Dutch-American migrants who did initially settle in the cities were most often farm laborers hoping to earn enough money during a short period in the city to eventually buy a plot of land on which to start their own farms and agricultural enterprises.3 With the exception of the arrival of the first individually migrating Jewish merchants dating back to the period of the French occupation of the Netherlands, the city environments of America were hardly ever the final destination of choice for nineteenth-century Dutch emigrants.4
Family cohesion being a strong traditional Dutch attribute, most Dutch-American migrants travelled collectively with immediate and extended family.5 Initially, many Dutch even migrated with entire congregations, most of these immigrants hailing from congregations under the collective umbrella of the Dutch Reformed faith, but leaving the Netherlands under the leadership of Secessionist ministers preaching a more orthodox faith.6 The abundant and un-settled lands
1 Herbert J. Brinks, Dutch American Voices: Letters from the United States, 1850–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1995), 5.
2 Abstracts of the Reports of the Immigrant Commission, S. Rep. at 107 (1911), accessed June 10, 2013,
http://archive.org/stream/reportsofimmigra01unitrich#page/n9/mode/2up.
3 Hans Krabbendam, Freedom on the Horizon: Dutch Immigration to America, 1840–1940, (Grand
Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2009), 80.
4 Brinks, Dutch American Voices, 1.
5 Robert P. Swierenga, Faith and Family: Dutch Immigration and Settlement in the United States, 1820–
1920 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 2000), 53.
6 Henry S. Lucas, Netherlanders in America: Dutch Immigration to the United States and Canada, 1789–
available in the Midwest were the perfect place for these religiously-motivated immigrants to establish communities free from the social ostracism sometimes experienced in their ever-liberalizing mother country. Brinks will even argue that the settlements of many Dutch Reformed communities “were designed to encourage ethnic isolation as a strategy for preserving family values and religious precepts”.7 This may seem somewhat suffocating, but it happened that
immigrants who were not church members actually preferred to associate with those of the Dutch Reformed since the latter’s ethnic network was extremely valuable in the strange, new environment.8 There are even records of migrants who were not devout or at all religious who
actually “swayed” on the boat or just after settling so as to be able to benefit better from this same network.9 And because the Dutch were known for their religious solidarity, it was not uncommon that the Dutch were “indifferent to their Catholic, Jewish or secularist countrymen”.10 Upon
arrival, rarely were the Dutch attracted to other religious groups, with the exception of the Presbyterian Church, as the doctrines of these historically Scottish Calvinists were very much akin to those of the Dutch Reformed tradition.11
However, Hans Krabbendam rightly notes that historians have, for too long, been under the “inflated impression” that the Secessionists and religiously inclined migrant movements have dominated Dutch-American historiography.12 Robert P. Swierenga similarly argues that “Netherlanders were pulled away by the American ‘magnet’ more than they were pushed away by any Dutch ‘devils.’”13 In 1866, the renowned Tijdschrijft voor Staathuishoudkunde en Statistiek
(Magazine of Political Economy and Statistics) describes this status quo on emigration to the United States in an article written by B.W.A.E. Sloet tot Oldhuis. Brinks summarized the article as listing “several structural, long term factors that propelled rural residents to depart” and revealing that the image the Dutch had of America was primarily one of “virgin land, high wages, low taxes
7 Brinks, Dutch American Voices, 11.
8 Annemieke Galema, Frisians to America 1888–1914: With the Baggage of the Fatherland (Groningen,
the Netherlands: REGIO-Project Uitgevers, 1996), 176.
9 Galema, Frisians to America, 176. 10 Swierenga, Faith and Family, 154. 11 Lucas, Netherlanders in America, 517. 12 Krabbendam, Freedom on the Horizon, 6. 13 Swierenga, Faith and Family, 59.
and individualism.”14 Eelco Ekker, a detached Mormon from Overijssel seeking prosperity in the
Midwest writes to his father that, indeed, “You know it too, I didn’t go to Utah for the Mormon faith, but, with God’s blessing, to be the means by which you could live a more comfortable life.”15
According to one American in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the Dutch had indeed already been coming to the city by “numerous trainloads” in the 1880s and 1890s.16 It was not until the
beginning of the twentieth century, however, that the individualism praised in Sloet’s article would convince more and more younger and independent Dutch urbanites to cross the ocean, or motivate those who initially preferred agriculture to remain in the cities “where high wages, together with the possibility of homeownership and the potential of capital accumulation, offered an attractive alternative to farming.”17
Scholars agree that the Dutch migrant’s urban focus “coincided with the belated but rapid industrialization of the Dutch economy after 1900.”18 Communal agriculture was abandoning its
traditional patriarchal set-up, drastically cutting its workforce and creating a vast number of excess farm laborers. Joseph Noorthoek of Friesland writes in a 1910 account of his migration to America that “there was no future in the Netherlands for an ordinary workman nor even for the most skilled workman.”19 Industrialization and these excess laborers jeopardized the already deficient job
opportunities for blue-collar workers of the Netherlands. Instead of undergoing “a drastic adjustment to factory life,” many craftsmen and (farm) laborers preferred to try their luck in or on the outskirts of the growing urban centers of America, either continuing their trade or hoping to combine farming with other jobs.20 Even though the bulk of blue- and white-collar Dutch were travelling to the colonial East Indies where their urban potential was greatest, there was a “modest” rise in individual emigrants to America and from 1900 onwards “the Netherlands had finally
14 Ibid., 20–21.;The article in question can be found here: B. W. A. E. Sloet tot Oldhuis, “Over de
oorzaken van de landverhuizing der Nederlanders naar de Vereenigde Staten,” in Tijdschrift voor Staathuishoudkunde en Statistiek 26 (1866): 79–102.
15 Eelco Ekker, March 1877 cited in J. Spitse, Altijd aan het Reizen: brieven van een mormoonse emigrant
naar Noord-Amerika, 1877–1913 (Zutphen, the Netherlands: Walburg Pers, 2011), 121.
16 Swierenga, Faith and Family, 53. 17 Brinks, Dutch American Voices, 8.
18 Robert P. Swierenga, “The Delayed Transition from Folk to Labor Migration: The Netherlands, 1880–
1920,” International Migration Review 27.2 (1993): 407.
19 Dutch Immigrant Letter Collection. Calvin College Hekman Library. Accessed 16–17 March, 2014.
http://www.calvin.edu/hh/letters/letters_main.html. (Joseph Noorthoek, “An Account of Some Noteworthy Events While Travelling From Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA, To St. Philipsland, The Netherlands And The Return Trip,” Grand Rapids, MI: printed by Cart Nienhardt, 1910).
‘caught-up’ with England, Ireland, Germany and the rest of northern Europe in the shift from family to industrial migrants.”21 1917 marked the highest percentage (50%) of individual Dutch
immigrants to the United States and by 1920, over half of the foreign-born Dutch in America lived in cities of 2500 or more.22 The four main cities where the Dutch would settle from 1880 onward were located around southern Lake Michigan: Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo, Michigan; Chicago, Illinois; and Paterson, New Jersey. Only Roman Catholic and Jewish Dutch settled in New York City.23
In spite of the increase in individual and urban migration, urban Dutch-Americans were in no way far removed from their more remote rural counterparts. Like other immigrant groups, the Dutch were quick to establish ethnic language newspapers circulating the familial, commercial, political and religious affairs of their fellow migrants. Throughout the country, Dutch communities published regional weeklies such as Patterson and Passaic’s (New Jersey) Het Oosten (The East) (1904–1940) and Chicago, Illinois, based Onze Toekomst (Our Future) (1896–1959). Some publications received national circulation, as was the case for De Sheboygan Nieuwsbode (1849– 1861) of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and De Grondwet (The Constitution) (1871–1938), which, although published in the smaller town of Holland, Michigan, counted eight thousand subscribers from across the entire nation at its publication peak in 1907 – the highest circulation any Dutch press in America has ever seen.24 Near the turn of the century, at least fifty Dutch language weeklies and magazines came into being, and although most would not be read from coast to coast due to their specific regional or religious scope, about fifteen of these were published over a longer period of time and for a broad public.25 Those forming the basis of the closer look at the Dutch language media covering the Pullman episodes of 1894 are the aforementioned De Grondwet, considered a national medium covering all corners of the business, political and religious views of Dutch-Americans; Orange City, Iowa’s De Volksvriend (The People’s Friend) (1874–1935), a predominately Protestant and Republican leaning paper; and De Pere, Wisconsin’s De Volksstem
21 Swierenga, “The Delayed Transition,” 414, 423.
22 Ibid., 407; Robert P. Swierenga, “The Dutch Urban Experience,” in The Dutch in Urban America, ed.
Swierenga et al. (Holland, MI: Joint Archives, 2004), 1.
23 Krabbendam, Freedom on the Horizon, 82–89.
24 Hans Krabbendam, “Nederlandse kranten in de Verenigde Staten 1849–1959,” accessed July 29, 2013,
http://kranten.kb.nl/about/VerenigdeStaten.
(The People’s Voice) (1890–1919), the only Dutch language publication with a Catholic and
Democrat emphasis.26
With respect to physical mobility within America itself, here too the Dutch showed a strong inter-connectedness. Having completed a monumental study of the Chicago Dutch, Swierenga reveals that there, entire communities would “pull up stakes in concert ... and relocate en masse.”27
In an essay tracing the development of Dutch truck-farming ventures in Chicago, David L. Zandstra recounts the “mutual interdependence” of Dutch farmers and urbanites working together to make a profit selling (extra) agrarian produce in the urban markets of Chicago.28 Another
profitable venture for the Dutch of Chicago was the so-called teamstering. What began as collecting private and market-based garbage, turned into maneuvering the city’s general waste and would come to include hauling coal and ice, disposing of general waste and even transporting heavy industrial freight and debris. This teamstering was a particularly successful Dutch venture and brought those from the city in contact with those living in the agricultural districts and those who, for whatever reason, frequented the harbors and stations where the collected garbage was often hauled to for further disposal by the state.29 In a letter written to his family in Holland dated April 30th, 1905, a rural immigrant from Groningen Klaas Niemeijer relates: “I haul loads [by horse] up to two hours away.”30
Although the urban Dutch were most inclined to keep their small businesses within family and ethnic kin, according to Zandstra, the Dutch in the Chicago truck-farming business hired Slovaks, Poles, Italians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians and other Eastern-European immigrants to help with the labor in the fields and gardens.31 These men could be picked up and dropped off en route to and from the urban neighborhoods where the Dutch sold their produce. This meant that the orthodox Dutch Reformed immigrant, for example, would have to work with devout Catholics, many of which had other ethnicities, but according to Zandstra, “life-long friendships were
26 Ibid.
27 Robert P. Swierenga, “The Dutch Urban Experience,” in The Dutch in Urban America, ed. Robert P.
Swierenga et al. (Holland, MI: Joint Archives, 2004), 4.
28 David L. Zandstra, “In the City, But Not of the City: Dutch Truck Farmers in the Calumet Region,” in
The Dutch in Urban America, ed. Robert P. Swierenga et al. (Holland, MI: Joint Archives, 2004), 119.
29 Robert P. Swierenga, Dutch Chicago: A History of the Hollanders in the Windy City (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 577–579.
30 Klaas Niemeijer, April 30, 1905 cited in Brinks, Dutch American Voices, 313. 31 Zandstra, “In the City,” 125.
established” and “these groups continued to support each other.”32 Swierenga’s research notes a
similar friendliness the Dutch exhibited with other ethnic and religious groups; among the Dutch, Jews and Blacks, for example, “were called by name and treated with respect.”33 In the urban environment of Progressive-Era America, ethnic and minority racism was wide-spread, and practiced not just by the American-born, but by many immigrant groups as well and “whether the racial categories being bridged were biological or cultural ones,” almost every ethnic group would have been subject to ostracism in some way or another.34 However, with their fair skin and
Western-European cultural backgrounds, the ‘Old immigrant’ Dutch were not as strong a target of immigrant-related racism from American-born. Also, because those early immigrants who had made a name for the Dutch were mostly strict Calvinist farmers who valued their isolated enclaves and wanted little to do with the affairs of the cities, the Dutch appeared to be a group from which both the American-born and immigrant minorities had little to apprehend.
In his research on Dutch-American occupational change, Swierenga reveals that relocation to America indeed almost always yielded upward economic mobility, the promise of which had pulled so many to its soil in the first place.35 Swierenga also notes that the potential for upward economic and by extension social mobility was generally higher in expanding industrial cities, like Chicago. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, most urban immigrants were of the “middling” class, a reasonably steady 70% originating in municipalities ranging in size from less than 5000 to 100 000+ inhabitants. Nearly six times as many “poor” were leaving the cities with populations of 50 000+ or less, cities from the interior provinces, Utrecht and Zwolle, for example, where industry was lagging behind places like Amsterdam and Rotterdam.36 And although first-generation rural settlers initially “enjoyed greater stability and had a minimal loss of status … within a generation, the Dutch in the expanding cities surpassed their kin in the rural colonies.”37
According to Swierenga’s research, the total percentage that, after migration, either stayed in the same occupational category (jobless, farm laborer, unskilled, skilled, farmer, low white collar, high
32 Ibid., 126.
33 Swierenga, “The Dutch Urban Experience,” 3.
34 David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York:
Basic Books, 2005), 51.
35 see Robert P. Swierenga, “Migration and Occupational Change,” in Faith and Family: Dutch
Immigration and Settlement in the United States, 1820–1920. (New York: Holmes & Meier, 2000), 257– 273.
36 Swierenga, “The Delayed Transition,” 419. 37 Swierenga, Faith and Family, 270.
white collar) or advanced forward at the beginning of the Progressive Era was 80 to 90%.38 As such, there were few Dutch immigrants who found themselves in the cities as a desperate last option, something which has often been considered the common plight of the foreign born in America.
2.2 The Dutch in the Workplaces
American immigrants made up the bulk of the labor force in many industries.39 Most turn-of-the-century Dutch migrants, however, were still not of the working class. As such, those who did labor in the industrial crafts and factories are a minority of interest. Due to lack of occupational research, it is difficult to determine just how many Dutch were employed in American industry, either directly upon arrival or after a certain number of years in the country. Thankfully, Swierenga’s extensive statistical research is extremely valuable in providing some helpful numbers and percentiles. Swierenga reveals that in the 40 years from 1880 to 1920, nearly 80 000 of all Dutch emigrants had urban origins, and that 70% of all Dutch migrants relocated to America.40
However, because more than half of the urban Dutch emigrants relocated to other cities in Europe or the promising Dutch colonies in Asia it can be assumed that there were surely fewer than 28 000 Dutch settling in American cities from 1880 to 1920 (70% of 40 000).41 Naturally, there were always cases of urban Dutch migrants who preferred an agricultural future in the new world, and up until 1870, when American land was still quite cheap, numerous blue-collard Dutch were indeed settling on farms in rural America.42 After this period, however, with labor devalued and upward economic mobility more difficult to attain, both the rural farm laborers and blue-collar skilled and semi-skilled city migrants would have generally remained longer in the cities.
Swierenga’s research with a particular focus on occupational migration starts at the year 1900, just after the “take-off” of labor migration from the Netherlands.43 Single male migration to
America (those most likely to become industrial laborers) increased steadily through 1880 to 1920
38 Ibid., 271.
39 Thomas Göbel, “Becoming American: Ethnic Workers and the Rise of the CIO,” Labor History 29.2
(1988): 174.
40 Swierenga, “The Delayed Transition,” 407, 409. 41 Ibid., 410.
42 Krabbendam, Freedom on the Horizon, 60. 43 Swierenga, “The Delayed Transition,” 406.
from 12 to 36%, with an outlying peak just after the war.44 After 1900, the number of single male emigrants from the larger cities of the Netherlands was also ten percent higher than its rural counterpart.45 From 1901 to 1920, Dutch emigrants employed in the secondary sector, which included manufacturing (textile, wood, metals, food, etc.), construction and general labor, counted for roughly 40% of the migrant population, which, in fact, overrepresented the workforce of its homeland counterpart by 20%.46 Clearly, more and more Dutch (farm) laborers were keen to start and/or move shop to American soil. With numbers from the Dutch Central Bureau for Statistics, according to Swierenga approximately 60 000 migrants relocated to America between 1900 and 1920.47 On the basis of Swierenga’s occupational percentiles, it can be estimated that roughly 24 000 Dutch-Americans were of the working class in the first two decades of the twentieth century (40% of 60 000).
Once settled, the interconnectedness of the rural and urban Dutch network made it easy for the Dutch to learn of job opportunities throughout the United States, and the successful Dutch enclaves provided valuable social support ensuring that ethnic, religious and familial kin had little to worry about in the way of initial places to stay, credible council and intelligence, food and if necessary, even money. Within just two days of immigration to America, the father of later labor and peace advocate Abraham Muste had found a job in a factory in Grand Rapids.48 This is no surprise, as the Dutch formed nearly half the workforce of the furniture industry in Grand Rapids.49 Chicago was known as the “‘Great Central Market’ of the nation”, so here, many of the excess agricultural workers from the Netherlands were quick to follow the example of those who had combined agricultural skills with the vicinity of cheap land in the suburbs of the city to make a profit growing and selling vegetable produce.50 In Kalamazoo, similar produce gardeners and truck famers even had the luxury of being eligible for seasonal winter work in the lumber factories to increase the family’s yearly income.51 With produce inevitably comes waste, and the Dutch were
just as canny in turning one man’s trash into another’s treasure; by 1913, Chicago had 202 licensed
44 Ibid., 408. 45 Ibid., 420. 46 Ibid., 416, 417. 47 Ibid., 411.
48 Krabbendam, Freedom on the Horizon, 85. 49 Ibid., 208–209.
50 Swierenga, Dutch Chicago, 552.
garbage wagons, almost all of which were in the hands of Dutch families and partnerships and continuing to grow in number.52 Some Dutch were even so successful that they were soon running their own factories, as was the case for Jan ter Braak and the Steketee family, both of Grand Rapids, opening a factory making wooden shoes in 1873, and lumber warehouses employing many other Dutch city workers onwards from 1862, respectively.53
The Dutch with factory experience in the Netherlands were often too poor to immigrate, and so many of those taking on factory work were slightly better-off, experienced agricultural laborers, some with the hopes of earning enough money to eventually establish their own farmsteads and agricultural businesses.54 Village craftsmen and laborers who were often healthier, more economically affluent, generally better educated and by extension more flexible were those most likely to be found taking on new and successful ventures in larger urban centers.55 These urban immigrants, whether temporary or not, found work in various sectors and states. This included and was certainly not limited to: boat building in Holland, Michigan, working at saw mills and lumber harbors in Muskegon, Michigan, brick making, carpentry and automotive production in Detroit, Michigan, teamstering, truck gardening and cement contracting in Chicago, Illinois and work in iron foundries and coach building in De Pere, Wisconsin.56 Furniture manufacturing provided one of the most prominent working-class occupations of the Dutch immigrants in the “major light industrial and commercial center” of Grand Rapids, as did the railroad and rail coach industries in Pullman and Hyde Park, Chicago.57 Paterson, New Jersey, although not one of the larger urban centers, housed what was the largest county of Dutch-Americans in the East, most of which worked in the industrial textile and silk production or managed to become successful by creating a niche in regional construction.58
52 Swierenga, Dutch Chicago, 580.
53 Krabbendam, Freedom on the Horizon, 212, 216. 54 Ibid., 198.
55 Brinks, Dutch American Voices, 221.
56 Geoffrey Reynolds, “Built Along the Shores of Macatawa: The History of Boat Building in Holland,
Michigan,” in The Dutch in Urban America, ed. Robert P. Swierenga et al. (Holland, MI: Joint Archives, 2004), 94–107; Krabbendam, Freedom on the Horizon, 214; James Evenhuis, “Detroit’s Motor City Dutch,” in The Dutch in Urban America, ed. Robert P. Swierenga et al. (Holland, MI: Joint Archives, 2004), 13–33; Robert P. Swierenga, Introduction to The Dutch in Urban America, ed. Robert P.
Swierenga et al. (Holland, MI: Joint Archives, 2004), ix–xii; Krabbendam, Freedom on the Horizon, 221.
57 Swierenga, Faith and Family, 268, 53; Krabbendam, Freedom on the Horizon, 211; Swierenga, Dutch
Chicago, 4.
58 Gerald F. de Jong, “Dutch Immigrants in New Jersey Before World War 1,” New Jersey History 94.2
Schoone-Working as a craftsman, or putting up with factory work must have been draining for the Dutch immigrants in the American cities, even if it was for just long enough to be able to earn enough to migrate to the coveted agricultural communities farther west. Factory labor was physically and, perhaps even more, mentally exhausting for Dutch farm laborers who were used to working with the land and animals outside in the fields as opposed to processing raw materials and operating heavy machinery in dusty and crowded factories indoors. As one Frisian family recalls, their 1924 move “to a lumber factory in the new world was a big change. In the evening, exhausted from factory work, father Age would sit and stare with moist eyes at nothing… ‘My head feels so funny.’ That was all he could say.”59 Louis van Koert, The Hague emigrant who
found work as a stonecutter and painter writes home to his friends of the socialist movement of the Netherlands that in Chicago, thousands are still working ten to twelve hour days, not including the early morning and late evening hours they must devote to travelling to and from the workplace, “For them, the situation is more than unbearable.”60 Local painter P.J.J. van der Heijden from
Orange City, Iowa reveals in a letter to a friend that his brother-in-law makes a good living with steady work and has little to complain, but that “he is a laborer which he does not like, which is something I can well understand, and now he is talking about either starting for himself or going back to Holland, but if he does that I think that the latter would be a worse mistake than the first.”61
As van der Heijden’s letter shows, although many urban immigrants spoke of the working life in the city as certainly very different, they almost always penned that things in America were far better off than in the motherland. In a 1908 letter to family and acquaintances, New Jersey painter Jan Willem Nijenhuis revealed that “You don’t have to be afraid of the boss here. You learn that quickly in America.”62 Likewise, in a letter written in 1893, W.J. van den Bosch praises the foreman of a factory where he works in Indiana.
In Holland someone like him would have been properly dressed, with chosen pride constantly commanding his laborers. This person though, walks around
Jongen, “There was Work in the Valley: Dutch Immigration to New Jersey, 1850–1920,” Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis 7.2 (2010): 77.
59 Hylke Speerstra, Cruel Paradise: Life Stories of Dutch Emigrants (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
2005), 38.
60 Archief Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis. Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis. Algemeen,
Correspondentie, 127, Koert, L.W. van. 1893–1894, August 10, 1893.
61 Dutch Immigrant Letter Collection. (P.J.J van der Heijden, Orange City, Iowa, January 10, 1893). 62 Jan Willem Nijenhuis, November 9, 1908 cited in Brinks, Dutch American Voices, 442.
in an old shirt and trousers with a chew of tobacco in his mouth. He helps wherever his help is needed, working side by side with his laborers…63
Whether everything was actually as rose-colored as often depicted should be taken into question. In her studies of Frisian immigrant letter-writing, Annemieke Galema revealed that Dutch-American correspondence was generically hyperbolic and at times even withheld the more negative news. Galema’s epistolary research emphasizes the amount of so-called ‘spekbrieven’ (bacon-letters) through which Dutch immigrants often exaggerated the opportunities, the harvests and of course the amount of meat being eaten each day.64
This overtly positive approach to epistolography was not limited to primitive comings-and-goings like food and weather, but also included, or rather, did not include, the deplorable conditions or socio-political backgrounds of industrial work. Klaas Niemeijer, a Chicago teamster almost entirely avoided the Chicago Teamster’s Strike of 1905 in his correspondence, writing only that “At present there is a huge strike here and sometimes people use revolvers and knives. If you were to see it you would be shocked.”65 Niemeijer, a teamster himself, was undoubtedly caught in
the middle of what would become one of the century’s most violent and deadly strikes, and all he felt necessary to relate was that the violence was shocking. Niemeijer’s acquaintances in the Netherlands were apparently worried that “cigar making is very bad work and that Pieterke’s [Klaas’s daughter of fifteen] life would be shortened by it.” Father Niemeijer responded only that “We value our children highly enough, so if that were true we would not keep her there. Pieterke is very healthy and she enjoys the work.”66 The response blatantly ignored questioning why the
assumptions had been made in the first place, and certainly lacked any valid arguments rebutting them. So too, does the Plaisier family correspondence tell nothing of the working conditions of wage earners Aart and Gerrit who worked in the furniture and gravel mine industries of Grand Rapids for years. In one of their letters, though, great lengths are made to describe certain farming operations, father Plaisier lamenting that letter writing was so expensive since “I could write six pages about the farm.”67 Even the blatantly honest anarchist Louis van Koert, who rarely had a
good word concerning his American plights, admitted he did not want to pen his everyday trials
63 Galema, Frisians to America, 107. 64 Ibid., 106–107.
65 Klaas Niemeijer, April 30, 1905 cited in Brinks, Dutch American Voices, 313. 66 Ibid.
“because this was less cheerful, and I wanted to conceal all the misery.”68 In a rare co-written
collection of family letters from Paterson, New Jersey, the disappointments which father Willem Woudenberg chose to leave out in his correspondence to the Netherlands are recounted by his twenty-one year old son Johan. Revealing what work was really like in the dye-factories of Paterson, Johan relates,
Dad must have thought many a time what a far cry it was from the white jacket and apron in his tidy and clean meat market in Holland to this small, rather dark dye shop, where the acid and steam rising from the dye troughs caused the eyes to tear constantly. … It was back-breaking work, unskilled, a job for men who couldn’t speak the English language and thus were not in a position to reason with the boss regarding the working conditions.69
When it came to such issues as language on the work floor, however, few letters hesitated to sugarcoat or obscure the particulars. It is clear that the Dutch were quick to recognize that learning to speak English was a way to upgrade their station and quite often, increase their pay. Aart Plaisier, a skilled cabinet-maker from Rotterdam recalls that the men in the furniture factories of Grand Rapids generally worked the same hours as their peers in Holland,
but the work here in factory is very different. You have to learn a great deal first. There are many Hollanders here in the factory, which makes it very easy for me, but it does not help in learning English. But I will not stay with this job for very long. As soon as I have acquired enough English usage, I will go to another factory where everyone is English, and I will learn much more.70
Peter Ypes Groustra’s letters to family in Friesland similarly tell of the railcar manufacturing factories of Pullman, Chicago, where bilingualism could earn English-speaking workers a dollar a day more.71 With regular loans at two dollars a day, incentive, in any case, was certainly not lacking.72
68 Archief Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, October 10, 1893.
69 Helen Westra, “Fear and Hope Jostled: Dutch Immigrant Life and Death in Paterson, New Jersey,”
Origins 8 (1990: Fall): 5–6.
70 Aart Plaisier, May 1, 1910 cited in Brinks, Dutch American Voices, 323.
71 Annemieke Galema, “Over de wereldzee naar de grote stad: Pieter Ypes Groustra met zijn gezin in
Chicago rond de eeuwwisseling,” in De Nederlandsche Leeuw. Maandblad van het Koninklijk Nederlandsch Genootschap voor Geslacht- en Wapenkunde, 109de Jaargang, (1992): 454.
72 Annemieke Galema, Zuster, kom toch over: belevenissen van een emigrantenfamilie uit Friesland:
According to the Abstracts of the Reports of the Immigrant Commission of 1911, foreign and American-born Dutch working in industry (manufacturing and mining) were earning on average $12.04 and $12.97 per week, respectively. As was to be expected, this was below the $14.37 average of native-born American whites, but also under the total average of $12.64 of all working-class laborers in America.73 In fact, of all the ‘old immigrants’ who were generally better
paid than their ‘new’ Southern and Eastern-European counterparts, the Dutch had the lowest average daily earnings.74 These figures coincide with the wages reported in correspondence back
to the Netherlands; in a 1906 letter, Klaas Niemeijer relates that his daughter earns just $7.50 a week at a cigar factory in Chicago, and Anko Hofman tells his brother in Groningen that the backbreaking work paving the streets of 1912 Grand Rapids paid just $12.90 a week.75 Three months later, Anko exchanged the irregular employment of street paving for work in a furniture factory, and was happy to recall that “Yes, that [cement paving] was hard work, but now I have a better job, namely at a furniture factory, making cabinets and tables and beds, not wall beds. I earn $10.90 for a 9-hour day. … I do wish I had come here sooner.”76 Even though extremely happy with such employment, men like Anko were falling short of the rest. The same 1911 Immigrant Commission report reveals that the popular silk and furniture manufacturing factories of Patterson and Grand Rapids were averaging respectively $12.50 and $11.67 a week ($431 and $575 a year) – wages still under the country’s working-class average of $12.64.77 The Dutch, diligent as always,
would not complain, but find a way to make ends meet. Orange City painter van der Heijden was lucky to have “received a nice job from that banker which will earn me at least 200 dollars; it has to be done by this winter, which is great because in wintertime there is little outside work here, but this is inside work”.78 (In comparison, in 1870, Chicago’s unskilled were lucky to find year-round
work averaging annual earnings of just $170–200.79) It was not strange then to find that the Dutch
employed the entire family to help with the cost. Maartje (Lautenbach) Zondervan relates in a 1911 letter to her brother that in Paterson, “Charlie is now fifteen years old and works in a factory. I
73 Abstracts of the Reports of the Immigrant Commission, S. Rep. at 307. 74 Ibid., at 371.
75 Klaas Niemeijer, Aril 30, 1905 cited in Brinks, Dutch American Voices, 313; Dutch Immigrant Letter
Collection. (Anko Hofman, Grand Rapids, MI, June 9, 1912).
76 Dutch Immigrant Letter Collection. (Anko Hofman, Grand Rapids, MI, September 17, 1912). 77 Abstracts of the Reports of the Immigrant Commission, S. Rep. at 303, 307.
78 Dutch Immigrant Letter Collection. (P.J.J. van der Heijden, Orange City, Iowa, January 10, 1893). 79 Swierenga, Dutch Chicago, 4.
take in washing and also work as a midwife.”80 The Zondervan children, in fact, had already been
helping with the cost for years. Since 1893, thirteen-year-old Antje and eleven-year-old Jeltje, like their father, worked in the silk factories of Patterson, all earning somewhere between just $4 and $5 in the week.81
In comparison, Swierenga’s research reveals that the Dutch in Chicago were likely the most economically successful compared to all other Dutch-American migrants. Here, skilled craftsmen and artisans were usually slightly better off, carpenters earning roughly $15 a week. Most successful were those lucky enough to be part of the entrepreneurial Dutch scavenging teams. By 1911, the sector’s hired hands alone were paid $15 a week and bosses were making profits as high as $120.82 In and around what Swierenga calls the “prosperity decade” of the 1920s Chicago, “even wage earners and independent craftsmen enjoyed higher wages won by unions in the city.”83
Likewise, workers who were affiliated with furniture craft unions in Grand Rapids earned on a daily basis 55 cents more than those who were not.84 The number of urban Dutch associated with such fraternal organizations, however, was strikingly low. For years, the immigrant Dutch had thrived with little help from outside their ethnic communities and it appeared they were still managing. A closer look at how the turn-of-the-century urban Dutch of America organized themselves socio-economically is necessary to understand the unique forces at work within this laboring class. On the axes of labor and religion, it becomes clear that the Dutch were a noteworthy minority. The following chapter will present the generally one-sided world of the Dutch working class, but also take a closer look at some of the individuals and organizations that stood out. A case study of the Dutch working class during the Pullman riots in Chicago will attempt to trace the Dutch as a labor minority in America to answer the question of whether or not the group influenced the (immigrant) labor movement that was essential to one of the major social achievements of Progressive-Era America.
80 Maartje Zondervan, May 27, 1911 cited in Brinks, Dutch American Voices, 302. 81 Tjerk Zondervan, November 13, 1893 cited in Brinks, Dutch American Voices, 294. 82 Swierenga, Dutch Chicago, 5, 580.
83 Swierenga, “The Dutch Urban Experience,” 12.
84 Hans Krabbendam, “Waarom christelijke vakbeweging onder de Nederlandse immigranten in Amerika
3. Congregating the Working-Class Dutch
3.1 Fathers and Fraternities
Extensive research has been done on the Dutch religious communities in America and scholars couldn’t agree more that the cornerstones of the thriving Dutch settlements were their ethnic churches which “anchored urban neighborhoods, just as they did rural villages”.1 Most
Dutch immigrants were members of the Dutch Reformed or Christian Reformed Churches. A slow but steady stream of Catholics from the sandy-soil regions of the north-east constituted a small share of the Dutch immigrants, but a religious motif for Catholic immigrants only played a role with the clergy, as most parish members felt comfortable ties to their regional counterparts in Germany and Belgium.2 The Catholic Church in America generally discouraged ethnic parish formation, the Dutch immigrants of a Catholic tradition, already low in number, generally joined the larger denominations where other German and Flemish believers worshipped. It is therefore impractical to speak of a specific Dutch Catholic presence in America, as was the case with the stable Jewish Dutch community.3 The latter predated both World Wars and was more or less Americanized before their fellow Dutchmen even began their North-American exoduses and, as such, the institutions and followers of the Dutch Jewish community have been excluded from this thesis.4
Alongside religious nourishment, the ethnic church as an institution provided both social and economic support systems, leaving almost no aspect of the immigrant’s well-being unaccounted for. Successful schools, and homes for the elderly like Paterson’s Holland Home were governed by the clergy and trustworthy church elders. In some cases, even insurance and death or unemployment benefit programs were initiated but this was done with extensive carefulness as there were devout Calvinists who felt such aid “reflected a lack of faith in God’s protective care”.5
Jan Hospers, active elder of the Christian Reformed Church and its off-shoots in Pella, Iowa,
1 Robert P. Swierenga, Introduction to The Dutch in Urban America, ed. Robert P. Swierenga et al.
(Holland, MI: Joint Archives, 2004), ix.
2 Krabbendam, Freedom on the Horizon, 24.
3 P. R. D. Stokvis, “Socialistische immigranten in de Verenigde Staten: Vrijheid Versus Gelijkheid,”
Groniek: Gronings Historisch Tijdschrift 96 (1986): 107.
4 Robert P. Swierenga, “Dutch Jewish Immigration and Religious Life in the Nineteenth Century,”
American Jewish History 80.1 (1990): 56–73.
5 Robert P. Swierenga, Dutch Chicago: A History of the Hollanders in the Windy City (Grand Rapids, MI:
reveals his concern for taking matters of socio-economic welfare out of the hands of the community church:
The poor fund that our church established is handed over to the municipality. I feel that those who favor this have good reasons apparently. But other times may come. It is usually dangerous to move ancient boundaries. The world is full of changes. They are seldom for the better.6
In her dissertation on the social action of the Reformed Church of America, Lynn Winkels Japinga reveals that the sphere sovereignty popular in the Netherlands under the leadership of Abraham Kuyper’s government was also policy in the new world: “The realm of the church was the spiritual, and if the church meddled in the political or economic realm, it exceeded its appropriate boundaries.”7 Joining forces with American trade and labor unions then meant questioning the
diligence of the Dutch heritage, the self-sufficiency of the strongholds that were thriving as a result, and in many cases, insinuated having to compromise religious doctrine. Unions themselves were just as wary of immigrant support and membership, particularly when it came to those religious immigrant minorities; from 1870–1920, roughly 40% of the working class were immigrants, and their managers were almost all disproportionately native-born, and Protestant.8 Although both the church and the union seemed to represent each other’s ideological opposite, no two institutions were as intertwined or played as large a role in shaping Dutch-American communities, thereby heavily determining their future.
In the Gilded Age, the religious pulpits and their press were presenting a cornucopia of “mixed signals” when it came to the role that religion should play in the lives of their working-class flock.9 Concerning those tenets advocated by the Dutch ethnic churches, the term mixed signals is, at the very least, an understatement. Alongside the scores of Catholics, some Jews and even a handful of Mormon Dutch emigrants who brought their religious doctrines and customs with them, from the early mercantile colonies of 1626 New Amsterdam to the Doleantie of 1886
6 Dutch Immigrant Letter Collection. Calvin College Hekman Library. Accessed 16–17 March, 2014.
http://www.calvin.edu/hh/letters/letters_main.html. (Jan Hospers, Pella, Iowa, October 30, 1883).
7 Lynn Winkels Japinga, “Responsible for Righteousness: Social Thought and Action in the Reformed
Church in America, 1901–1941” (Dissertation, Union Theological Seminary, 1992), 31, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses.
8 Robert H. Craig, “Nineteenth-Century Labor Radicalism,” in Religion and Radical Politics: An
Alternative Christian Tradition in the United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 9.
in the Netherlands the Dutch Reformed church in America regularly branched out further left, right and center. Much of the friction sparking the divisions within this church actually predated the denomination’s migration to America, and since some tensions coincidentally pertain to the issue of labor-oriented organizations, it is relevant to briefly recount this history.
The National Reformed Church of the Netherlands (Nederlands Hervormde Kerk, NHK) underwent a secession in 1834 based on controversial disputes between the church’s traditional Calvinists and Enlightened Protestants. The groups that left the in their eyes ever-liberalizing NHK constituted members advocating a more orthodox Calvinist doctrine and evolved into what came to be known as the Christian Reformed Church in the Netherlands (Christelijke Gereformeerde Kerk, CRK). In 1886, politician and theologian Albert Kuyper led a second separatist movement within the NHK, namely the neo-Calvinist revival, also known as the Doleantie. These followers merged with the smaller parishes of the CRK in 1892 to form the Reformed Churches of the Netherlands (Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland, GKN). Most of the second and third wave of Dutch-American Reformed immigrants were followers of either of these newest, more orthodox Calvinist branches.10 And although these Dutch separatists were theologically closer to their Calvinist predecessors (the pilgrims who had settled in New Amsterdam in the eighteenth century), these groups of fellow ex-Dutchmen would experience just as much animosity amongst themselves as had been the case for the Reformed mission in the mother country.
The national Dutch Reformed Church in America (RCA) was under the auspices of the Classis of Amsterdam from its foundation until its official break with Dutch governance in 1792. Remarkably, this break did not occur until more than 150 years after the founding of the American mission; issues concerning the acculturation of the Reformed mission to American customs (i.e. services in the English language, the singing of hymns, church polity, and relations with other denominations) instigated the split. There were members of the RCA who did not support such Americanization and certainly disagreed with the almost inevitable severance of ties with the Netherlands. As a result, in 1822 the ‘True’ Dutch Reformed Church (TDRC) was established, intent on upholding the Dutch language and traditional doctrines of the Reformed tradition of the motherland. With the waves of 1834 Separatist immigrants came a second trying period for the RCA. Although initially happy to help establish these migrating Separatists under a new 1847
10 Hans Krabbendam, “Waarom christelijke vakbeweging onder de Nederlandse immigranten in Amerika
